French Open: Beating Earth

The French Open started this week, and among my first tasks upon landing in Paris was to figure out how you actually make a clay tennis court. When you grow up playing tennis in the Midwest, or anywhere in America, really, there aren’t many opportunities to play on clay. So, here goes: start with a layer of large stones, two feet thick, topped by an inch of gravel, five more of clinker—residue from volcanic rock that can absorb and retain water—and a top strata of limestone. This last layer is the one off which the balls at the French Open are actually bouncing, and the event’s organizers are proud to say that the stone comes from the quarries in Saint-Maximin, outside Paris, that were mined to build most of Haussmann-era Paris. The red clay is ground brick or tile. Each court requires more than a ton of the stuff, which is spread at a depth of only two millimeters. Why bother? This is Paris, so mostly style: “aesthetics, player comfort, and color” are the three reasons, in that order, offered by the Open.

“Clay is a subtle composition of elements, making it a unique and particularly noble surface,” the press guide says. The people who run the Open are clearly infatuated with the idea of their tournament as the most distinguished of the four majors. They note that “Les Anglos Saxons” call the dirt red clay, while the official name is terre battue. That’s “beaten earth,” which serves both literary and descriptive purposes. Matches on clay take longer because the ball moves slower, extending rallies, games, and sets. Clay specialists are known for grinding out matches in ways that frustrate those able to put more pop on their ball: Pete Sampras famously never won at the French Open.

Americans, especially, are at a disadvantage in the Open—clay favors creativity over power, and in the U.S., tennis is about power. But the French aren’t responding to clay well either these days: their drought at the Open dates back further than the U.S.’ drought at its own Slam, the U.S. Open, and even further, in fact, than the American drought at this tournament. (American men have won four times since the Frenchman Yannick Noah’s victory in 1983; American women have won thirteen times in the Open era, twice since Mary Pierce won France’s lone Open-era women’s title, in 2000.) There’s little reason to believe France’s luck is about to change; Rafael Nadal has won six of the last seven titles in Paris, and he will likely break Bjorn Borg’s record and take his seventh this year.

Still, the clay, and the artistry it supposedly elicits, is a point of pride in France. More from the press guide:

These materials, shaped by the teams at Roland Garros, become a playground whose qualities are limitless—land reserved for the giants of tennis. This work done, the artists can enter into alliance with the Earth. Modern players can express their inner Vulcan while giving the yellow ball trajectories that possess arabesque foolishness. For us mere mortals, it is simply the emotion of seeing this meeting between man and the beaten earth.

This meeting of Vulcans takes work: nearly a hundred people are employed in raking and watering the grounds. Unlike hard courts, clay does well with a bit of wetness—though not too much—and the courts are submerged in water every evening for fifteen minutes. During the day, water trapped in the clinker comes back up in the form of humidity. The courts are then watered continuously throughout the day, between games, by teams of employees carrying large yellow hoses. (One such employee got a bit overzealous and gave me a late afternoon dousing in the press seats on Court 1.)

All of the aesthetic work does also have a practical purpose: “Players would be dazzled if they had to play on white limestone,” the guide says. But why red? Forgive the rhyme, but players were frazzled a few weeks back, in Madrid, where tournament organizers—Boise State football fans, presumably—had changed the courts’ hue to blue. Nadal was not happy—he lost—and when Rafael Nadal is not happy with a clay court, people take notice. But the courts stayed red thanks to simple coincidence: tennis, which was first played on grass, came to France in 1878, at Cannes, thanks to a pair of English brothers; the climate wasn’t quite right for grass, so they crushed up some bricks and covered the court. Thus, terre battue.